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When it comes to wearable technology I've always been a fan of Google Glass. I can take or leave the whole smartwatch thing; as I've written before somewhere the wristwatch for me became obsolete the moment I got my first PCS phone with network-synchronized time.

But I totally get the concept of anywhere computing—or whatever they call it when the Internet scales seamlessly between multiple screens of different sizes and shapes. And as I'm already quite comfortable wearing glasses, Google Glass seems to me like a perfect fit.

Or so I thought, until I actually saw someone wearing it in public.
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Flurry, a mobile ad company, published a piece on their blog this week entitled "The Rise of the Mobile Addict". It's basically a series of charts that I thought interesting enough to share and dissect.

While I'm no fan of mobile ads—thanks to AdAway for Android I pretty much never see them—the analytics they yield can be surprisingly useful!

Today at 2:30pm Hong Kong Time—2:30am for yours truly in Toronto—upstart Android phonemaker OnePlus finally revealed their début device, the OnePlus One, on Twitter. You can scroll through the company's feed to see all the details, and there are a lot of them!

If you haven't heard of OnePlus, they're a company led by former OPPO executive Peter Lau. And just like OPPO, OnePlus has partnered with Cyanogen, Inc. for a custom Android ROM on this, their first smartphone. Despite all the hype they've been pretty good at keeping the actual hardware under wraps; now that it's out in the open let's see what the tech press has to say about it.
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The other week, Bell announced that they were first to deploy their newly bought 700Mhz spectrum in Upper Hamilton. Steve Punter, HC - No "i" and myself drove to Hamilton to check it out and indeed, Bell had 700Mhz running though it was only on a handful of towers and not every single tower.

We learned a few things. First off, Bell only owns a 6Mhz paired channel (effectively 5Mhz) of spectrum in that market which they can use to deploy LTE. What this means is that the maximum speed on that band is 37.5Mbps. Just to compare, Bell uses a 10Mhz channel on AWS (Band 4) which is capable of speeds of up to 75Mbps while they use a juicy 20Mhz channel on 2600Mhz (Band 7) which can go up to 150Mbs. So, their 700Mhz is never going to be as fast as the rest of their spectrum.

Secondly, since 700Mhz was only running on a fraction of Bell’s towers, their deployment is probably more so that Bell can say that they were first to do it or “Yes we have it”.

Not long after Bell’s announcement, Rogers announced that they also deployed 700Mhz and in bigger markets; Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. Rogers also reminded us that they own 2x the amount of 700Mhz spectrum that the competition has. Does that mean it’s twice as fast?
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Before you ask yourself how this review qualifies to be in the Android forum, placing it here was recommended to me by Howard Chui. After all, I needed my Android phone to fly this drone, so in a sense this is actually an Android app review that happens to work with a piece of external hardware.

I should start by admitting that I've never tested (or even flown) a quadrocopter before, and so unlike my smartphone reviews I won't have a wealth of past experience to draw upon. When I started this test I didn't even know what the norm was for quadrocopter features, and so I did a little background research. I looked at other reviews of the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 to make sure that what I'd observed was also observed by others. I found reviews of other quadrocopters that were considered the competition. However, as best I can possibly do, I'll try to keep any other opinions of the aircraft out of this assessment, other than to compare facts, such as battery life or range.

Perhaps a good place to begin is with the geeky stuff. Were this just a four motors with fan blades on them that somehow the operator managed to fly successfully using just a remote control, then there wouldn't be much to say here. However, to make this device flyable by complete novices such as myself it needed some very sophisticated software. In the end, the only thing the operator needs to worry about is that he wants the aircraft to move forward, backward, side to side, rotate, or go up and down. It's almost as easy as driving an RC car, but not quite.
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I had the opportunity to play with the Sony Xperia Z2 today. I was also fortunate enough to bring a HTC One M8 along to compare with it.

If you're a Sony fan and are familiar with last year's Xperia Z1 then the Z2 is best described as a mild improvement.

Size-wise, the Z2 and its 5.2" screen make it a little bit bigger. In a way I'm disappointed because the Z1 with its somewhat hard corners makes it feel bigger than it really is.

The Z2 is also a little thinner.

When I reviewed the Z1 last year I thought it was a nice phone but compared with it's contemporaries; the LG G2, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One (M7) it had the worst screen. In absolute terms, it wasn't a horrible screen but the viewing angle really lagged behind it's competitors.

So, the first thing I noticed was that the Z2 has a really nice screen. In fact, it's the first Sony phone I've used that has a top-notch screen that's as good as its rivals instead of a good but not great one.
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My accessories bag will be a little heavier this weekend, as my better half and I spend Easter in New York City. We've relied on portable battery chargers while on holiday for a few years now, but the ones we've been using—all the rage in Hong Kong in 2011—have lately started to fail us.

So I've decided to shell out the big bucks for a brand name that I recognize, Anker. I ordered a pair of Astro 3Es from Amazon Canada. At the time they were on sale for $49.99 CAD; as of this writing they're now ten bucks cheaper.
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While doing research for this review, I discovered a whole other universe where the limits of precision are still being pursued and a community of fans that have no limits of how much they would spend on time pieces. It's truly incredible that watches have not become obsolete considering it would take you longer (relatively speaking) to glance at your wrist to tell the time than what's displayed on your screen right now. I haven't worn a watch for decades. The day I picked up my Nokia Fido phone was when I didn't see the point of adding mass to my left wrist.

But in a twist of irony that puzzles me is how much more valuable and costly mechanical watches have become. You would think that when quartz was available on mass, nobody would be interested in manual wind up watches. Could this be a storyline for smartphones? Hmmm...
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Parting is such sweet sorrow... Yesterday marked the end of my time with the HTC One M8, on loan from Bell.

I supposed that the next logical step would be for me to spend some quality time with the other flagship smartphone of early 2014, the Samsung Galaxy S5. I've handled a pre-production model briefly, and while it seems like a solid upgrade to the GS4 it's not at all in the same class as the M8, at least in terms of the hardware. In fact, I don't think anything is—compared to the M8 my own Nexus 5 feels like a cheap plastic toy.

But there exists a phone that I'd recommend over the M8 to to prospective buyers, and that's the One before it.
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What follows is a real-world test of the 4 mega—sorry, UltraPixel camera on my locked-to-Bell HTC One M8. That is to say, it's not an exhaustive review of the camera and available features by any means, but rather a taste of what it's like to use when out and about.

Case in point: early yesterday morning saw a double breakfast date somewhere on Highway 10 at the Caledon Family Restaurant. Good conversation and a full table of food didn't afford a proper test of everything the M8's Duo Camera can do, but the results will at least give you a Sense (get it?) of what can be achieved with a modicum of effort.
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